Mathew's comments - Latest Comments in Careful with that data, Eugene

Re: Careful with that data, Eugene

safex982 — Mon, 19 May 2008 12:47:14 -0000

Well, i like this post.

Re: Careful with that data, Eugene

mathewi — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 15:31:02 -0000

Thanks, Leigh. That certainly tends to support my own hypothesis --
which is, of course, based on virtually no facts and mostly a lot of
conjecture and anecdotal evidence. :-)

Re: Careful with that data, Eugene

leigh — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 11:52:46 -0000

nice one Mathew. You'll enjoy this. Found via Federman

http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?requ...

Re: Careful with that data, Eugene

allen stern — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 09:25:00 -0000

I'd argue Equifax is larger than Experian... here is scary... back in my old corporate days, I built a customer/consumer database with about 9-10 million of our customers. Experian came in and said they could matchup name/email to their database and give us 30-40 more points of data on each record in the db from credit info to salary, etc. And we think Beacon is bad :)

Re: Careful with that data, Eugene

mathewi — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 00:21:02 -0000

I have no doubt that they have lots of purchasing data and demographic
profiles from their credit arm -- but how do they know whether people
spent more than 500 dollars online or whether they use Google or
Yahoo? Do they track people's behaviour online and watch every site
they spend money on? I doubt it. In fact, I'm pretty sure that would
be illegal. As far as I can tell, they do surveys. And surveys are
notoriously unreliable. They often tend to show whatever you want them
to show.

Re: Careful with that data, Eugene

Phil Wolff — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 22:43:51 -0000

Experian is the US's largest credit database firm. Anyone in the US (Canada?) who's ever applied for a credit card, home loan, college loans, medical loans, apartment rental application, is in their system. Your profile includes everything you've put on your application, all sorts of information pulled at random and provided by your banks, credit unions, credit card companies, and retailers. Employers also use Experian and others like them as part of background checks.

Their demographics unit has humongous amounts of data from which to extract trends.

So the real question is why, among all the conclusions about behavior they might have drawn, did they choose this one? Why not MSN vs. Yahoo, or any of thousands of other distinctions? Do they have a specific agenda? Is Yahoo! or Google a customer?

Re: Careful with that data, Eugene

mathewi — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 17:05:02 -0000

I agree, Daniel. That's a good analogy.

Re: Careful with that data, Eugene

Daniel Gibbons — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 15:07:51 -0000

A reasonable analogy might be the people who shop on the home shopping channels. Sure they often spend a lot of money but that rarely has anything to do with their income level.

Re: Careful with that data, Eugene

StevenHodson — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 13:55:39 -0000

Perfect post title Mathew IMO and I felt much the same as you did when I first read the post except my reaction was more of WTFATTA - or do they even know.

Re: Careful with that data, Eugene

mathewi — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 13:31:02 -0000

Same company -- it has a consumer-demographic analytics arm as well as
the credit arm.

Re: Careful with that data, Eugene

veverkap — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 13:21:49 -0000

Is that a different Experian than the credit agency?

Re: Careful with that data, Eugene

marcelweiss — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 13:21:04 -0000

yeah, you can use yahoo pipes for that stuff. but feedrinse is easier and faster set up for just filtering single feeds.
Especially helpful with all the successful blogs turning into small teamdriven onlinepublications with more daily posts than actually necessary. (mashable back then was the first blog there I asked myself wether they've forgotten that they also act as a filter etc)

Re: Careful with that data, Eugene

mathewi — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 13:16:02 -0000

Thanks for the tip, Marcel :-)

Re: Careful with that data, Eugene

marcelweiss — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 13:09:48 -0000

Duncan Riley was the reason I stopped reading Techcrunch sometime late last summer. A blog I used to follow religiously.
Some time ago I created my own TC-Feed that delivers only the posts from Arrington, sorta oldschool-TC.

Kinde offtopic, sorry. :)

You're right btw.